Definition of Career Development

Video Transcript

"Career development is more or less it's an ongoing, it's a life long process of gaining knowledge and improving your skills that will help you in establishing your career plan. It is important in knowing what direction you are heading in, what you plan to do, what your goals are, what you want to accomplish when you walk out of your institution that you are in and you know what you are working towards so we can get you to that goal in the quickest possible way. I do a lot of one on one counseling with students and my appointments are lengthy. The usual appointment lasts about an hour meeting with a student initially, talking with a student, see what kind of direction they want to head in, past experience, what they are hoping to work on with me and we do career assessments and then we meet together again and talk after the assessments to see what I can do to assist them. The first part I tell students is you need to know yourself first. You need to do a little self exploration, you need to know what your skills are, what your interests are, what your abilities are, your personal values, your strengths and your weaknesses and how you can use those towards a career. Meeting with a career counselor is helpful to kind of give you some directions, some path, some guideway there, working towards that seeing how you can find a career that fits your personality, your interests, your skills, that plays up your strengths and helping you work towards that, setting out some educational goals some guideways, some careers that would work towards that and then of course you know yourself better than we after talking with you for an hour or two, you look at the information, the things that we can give you and then you ultimately make the decision of what works best for you. I always recommend to a student you can read about a job all you want to, all day long but you don't know what that job entails unless you see it being done firsthand. I think job shadowing, I think talking with people who have worked in these different careers is helpful in knowing more about what happens on a day to day basis in a particular career."